Richard Stallman detained by UN Security

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Wonderful story on Bruce Perens’s Blog…

Richard Stallman, Mark Shuttleworth, and I are in Tunis, Tunisia for the UN World Summit on the information society. We’ve had an interesting day :-)

Richard is opposed to RF ID, because of the many privacy violations that are possible. It’s a real problem, and one worth lobbying about. At the 2003 WSIS in Geneva, there was objection to the RF ID cards that were used, resulting in a promise that they would not be used in 2005. That promise, it turns out, was not kept. In addition, Richard was given a hastily-produced ID with a visible RF ID strip. Mine was made on a longer schedule, it seems, and had an RF ID strip that wasn’t visible. I knew it was there because they clearly had us put our cards to a reader at the entrance gate.

You can’t give Richard a visible RF ID strip without expecting him to protest. Richard acquired an entire roll of aluminum foil and wore his foil-shielded pass prominently. He willingly unwrapped it to go through any of the visible check-points, he simply objected to the potential that people might be reading the RF ID without his knowledge and tracking him around the grounds. This, again, is a legitimate gripe, handled with Richard’s usual highly-visible, guile-less and absolutely un-subtle style of non-violent protest.

During his keynote speech at our panel today, Richard gave a moment’s talk about the RF ID issue, and passed his roll of aluminum foil around the room for others to use. A number of people in the overcrowded-to-the-max standing-room-only meeting room obligingly shielded their own passes. UN Security was in the room, not only to protect us but because of the crowd issue, and was bound to notice. Richard and I delivered our keynotes, followed by shorter talks by the rest of the panel and then open discussion.

At the end of the panel, I went out in the hall to be interviewed by various press entities including Al Jazeera. Another item for my CIA dossier, but I’m sure my association with Richard would have caused more notes to be taken today. I was busy with the press for two solid hours. So, I didn’t see what happened with Richard. But a whole lot of the people in the room did, and stayed with Richard for the entire process.

Apparently, UN Security would not allow Richard to leave the room.

Richard and I are actually here representing the United Nations, and are carrying UN Development Program IDs. I would otherwise merit a “business entity” ID, but I guess because of our keynote-speaker status our UN Development Program hosts ordered us better treatment. Richard and I also have some limited immunity as delegates to this conference. So, this was no doubt an interesting problem for the security folks, who had no real idea who Richard was except that he was someone reasonably distinguished who was visibly violating their security measure….

[From Bruce’s entry for November 18. Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.]

Who hosted the WSIS Summit?

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Why, Tunisia, a country not noted for its commitment to freedom of expression, or indeed of anything else. In the course of his amiable overview of the Summit, Bill Thompson notes:

Hosting WSIS has not made Tunisia freer or more open. In fact, the endorsement we have provided by being here may even help sustain the government of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.

But in the long-term, if every time we talk about Tunisia we remind people that it hosted a summit dedicated to free expression, and point out its failure to live up to its international obligation, then it may help those who want to reform Tunisian politics.

Hmmm… And pigs might also fly. Bill posted (on Flickr) some vivid photographs of the demonstration by Reporters without Frontiers of a world map with lots of blacked-out areas representing countries whose ruling regimes censor the Net.

More cynical views of WSIS were posted by Kieren McCarthy, who noted how the Swiss Prime Minister was ‘hounded’ by Tunisian media for calling a spade a spade:

Mr Schmid stunned delegates to the Summit when he said it was not acceptable for the UN to “continue to include among its members those states which imprison citizens for the sole reason that they have criticised their government or their authorities on the internet or in the press.”

He then mentioned Tunisia in particular: “For myself, it goes without question that here in Tunis, within its walls and without, anyone can discuss quite freely. For us, it is one of the conditions sine qua non for the success of this international conference.”

Quote of the day…

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… comes from a nice NYT profile of Lynne Truss, author of Eats, shoots and leaves, the best-selling book on the importance of the apostrophe.

Asked if he had any insight into the book’s popularity, Andrew Franklin, whose tiny company, Profile Books, published it in Britain, appeared to give the question extended thought. “I have a theory,” he finally said. “It’s very sophisticated. My theory is that it sold well because lots of people bought it.”

No one ‘owns’ the internet

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This morning’s Observer column about WSIS.

The governance row was so acrimonious not just because of resentment of America’s allegedly dominant role, but also because many regimes throughout the world cannot abide the notion that something as powerful and pervasive as the net should not be controlled.

What these folks do not grasp is that lack of control is the whole point of the net. It was designed from the ground up to be a self-organising, permissive system. A central feature of its architecture is that there would be no ‘owner’, no gatekeeper. If your network’s computers spoke the agreed technical lingo, you could hook up to the net, with no questions asked.

In other words, lack of control is not – as Iran, China and a host of other repressive UN members think – a bug, it’s a feature. And it’s what has enabled the explosive, disruptive growth that has made it such a transformative force in the world. In these circumstances, entrusting responsibility for the net to an organisation such as the UN would be as irresponsible as giving a clock to a monkey…

Late subbing at the Economist

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The one periodical I try to read every week is The Economist. Although I often disagree with its editorial line, it’s very well written, has terrific journalists and a very wide range of interests. It is also the best-subbed periodical I know — which is why it was so strange to come on a lexicographical error on page 84 of the issue of November 12th. (The first time I’ve detected one in years of reading.) Here’s the relevant extract from the online edition:

Trade associations representing publishers and authors are suing Google, claiming that the very act of scanning books without permission is an illegal reproduction. The case promises to keep the lawyers busy. Google seems to have begun back-pedalling, noting that the books it is currently scanning are ones that are out of copyright. It is even working on a model of pay-per-view charging, according to one publishing executive.

Nothing wrong there, you say, and you are right. But in the print edition “back-pedalling” is “back-peddling”. Only a small thing, I know, but we pedants notice these things. And even Homer nodded occasionally.

Professor Negroponte’s Laptop

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Andy Carvin has done an interesting — and revealing — interview with the CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project. She’s refreshingly open and honest about the difficulties and possibilities of the project. Confirms my hunch that it will have as much impact on the West as it has on the developing world because it will effectively commoditise computing. And it runs Linux!

Robert Mugabe: Internet expert

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Comic relief time. Robert Mugabe made a ponderous speech to WSIS on the subject of “How Western states abuse the Internet”. Zimbabwe was concerned, he said,

that information communication technology (ICT) continues to be used negatively – mainly by developed countries – to undermine national sovereignty, social and cultural values.

The President also challenged the still undemocratic issue of Internet governance, saying one or two countries insisted on being world policemen on the management and administration of the Internet, a worldwide network of computers which facilitates data transmission and exchange.

The admiring report of his speech in the Harare Herald (written by the appropriately named Innocent Gore) goes on to say that

the Internet was developed by an American company called Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the company managed it in consultation with the United States Department of Commerce.

Developing countries were proposing that this function be managed by an inter-governmental authority, but the US government was against such an arrangement as this would result in it losing control of the Internet and all revenue associated with the information superhighway.

African countries wanted the composition and role of the present governing body to be a fully representative authority and wanted to be accorded the opportunity to actively participate in international organisations dealing with Internet governance.

Truly, you couldn’t make this up. I wonder if the aforementioned Innocent is by any chance related to Al Gore, who famously once claimed to have invented the Internet.

I particularly like Mugabe’s concern about the “still undemocratic issue of Internet governance”. Myself, I am concerned about the still undemocratic issue of Zimbabwean governance.

[Thanks to Richard Synge for the link.]

Correction… Bill Thompson writes to say that Al Gore never made that assertion. It was, he says, “a slander put about by the Republicans – see Seth Finkelstein’s analysis“.